It begun at the first minute of the first episode. A normal looking man walks into a psychologist office, unannounced. Sits, not confortably, and warns the doctor: he will not be disclosing his name or the real nature of the work he does, since both are sensitive. The therapist accepts him as a client, nodding at the “garbage disposal consultant” job description. It does feel like she knows who he is, and what he does. Then, to start the session, he relates an incident in his job, and we see what happened meanwhile we heard what he tells. Slowly we realize that he is no consultant, but a mafia boss. Actually, a mafia boss that suffers panic attacks, and needs a doctor to fix him, since a mafia boss can not be afraid.
The Sopranos pulled off that magical thing that few works of fiction manage: it told us a tale that we had no chance whatsoever to live ourselves, but it made it so close to our lives, to our concerns, weaknesses and strengths, that we could not stop looking, we could not stop nodding every other time one or another member of the Soprano family said something, seeing ourselves in the distorted mirror of their own lives.
In the last days I have been remembering a complain that we frequently heard from Tony Soprano himself, the mafia boss. He used to wonder what had happened to the silent heroe, why such figure had disappeared, why was it appreciated no more as rol model for his contemporaneous americans. With a passion and a nostalgia that only a second generation migrant can have, he repeatedly mused admiringly about a North America that he could not have known, ruled by men of few words, less gestures and even less, but determining, acts. Somebody silent, ethically unimpeachable, and capable of righteous action against the odds, like Gary Cooper in High Noon.
The kind of man that came to mind when I heard about Piet Kuijt.
In the years of the World War II, the occupation leaders decided to exclude dutch citizens from a rather broad area of dunes, not too far away from The Hague. In that area Piet Kuijt worked, planting a plants capable of fixing the sand in place. The reason of the exclusion was that the nazi’s used this area to shoot the members of the resistance that they manage to catch, and bury them in unmarked graves, in the sand. Piet Kuijt heard the shoots every time this happened, so he planted trees to mark the places. When the war was over and the occupants gone, the corpses were found thanks to him, and given proper burial. The years passed by, and Pieter Kuijt never told this tale, to anybody but the persons that recovered the bodies. The government first, and then survivors associations, wanted to praise him with public honors, which he refused. Only recently, a historian caught the tale, and wanted to know about the life of this heroe. Piet Kuijt died in 1973, but a son and a daughter are still alive, well in their eighties. They do remember his father. As a silent man, who never said a word about the war, and expend most of the time that they remember looking far away, smoking his pipe in peace and silence.
So then I remember the nostalgia of Tony Soprano and, for once, I don’t share it. I have no doubt that Piet Kuijt was as much a heroe as a heroe should be, as those mythical characters that Tony Soprano admired could have been. But I also know that it took a war, and the structural and organized repetition of crimes against humanity for the heroe to do his deed, to become actually a heroe. And I know that he also paid the price, and could not talk anymore about it, nor about much else, to anybody.
I am relieved to live in a continent that needs no such heroes no more. Sit Tibi Terra Levis, Piet Kuijt.